It's time government remember 'we the people'

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln urged the nation’s resolve “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

He did not then try to define what a person was.

That definition of personhood, of citizenship, has changed over our couple of centuries, mostly becoming more inclusive and rewarding.

At our nation’s dawn, most states only allowed land-owning white male adult Protestants to vote. The original Constitution, for taxation and federal representation purposes, counted blacks as three-fifths of a person, and “Indians” not at all.

Over time those restrictions fell, piecemeal, so that more of our citizenry could participate in “the general Welfare.” We gradually extended the right to vote, access to education, access to financial services, the right to form unions to counterbalance rising corporate power, and access to retirement income and health care.

We built an infrastructure that supports our health, commerce and recreation. At our best, we worked, as Lincoln put it, “With malice toward none, with charity for all…to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

But now it seems our government in Washington is reversing direction. Instead of improving voting access, it is putting up impediments. Instead of supporting public education, it is trying to cut funding and divert it to private schools, including sham for-profit colleges. Instead of building access to financial services, it is gutting the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, allowing professional finance managers to more easily fleece people.

Instead of improving health care, it is sabotaging the broadest, best access we have devised. Instead of maintaining social security and Medicaid, it is working to bankrupt them.

Instead of maintaining our infrastructure, it is seeking to privatize roads and water systems, meaning increased costs, funding of profits instead of services, and pretty reliably, decreased services.

The list goes on. Access to information is essential to a free, self-ruling people; but our government is removing that access from our public websites, and ending the open internet that lets us find information, and revising rules on media ownership so that a few powerful companies can filter and control what we learn.

It is rescinding clean air and water protections despite known increases in illness and death. It is defunding national parks and shrinking monuments to subsidize mining with public land. It is permitting industrial-scale killing of endangered species.

It is resisting action on climate change, committing our posterity to a chaotically impoverished world.

It is cutting taxes so that the rich make billions, but government will be unable to fund the prosperity we have created by designing our systems for the general welfare.

Many of these government reversals follow the direction of lobbyists, whose spending kicked up last year to a mind-boggling $3.34 billion. The backward pattern in these cuts is that they further empower the powerful and weaken our common well-being.

Perhaps the cuts flow naturally from the me-first ethic that has seized our country. That attitude is ugly coming from a wealthy nation, and particularly ugly coming from the wealthiest within that nation. But it is hardly new. It is easy for those in power to declare “Every man for himself.”

Everyone is subject to the seductions of power and money, but Republicans are usually proud to claim themselves the Party of Lincoln, so it may seem peculiar that these anti of, by, and for the people stances are emphatically Republican based. Perhaps the GOP’s historic emphasis on small government has not updated to deal with large corporations, and has dwindled into inadequacy.

Whatever the reason, it is past time for all parties in government to exercise the intelligence and humanity to prioritize the well-being of not just we the wealthy and powerful but of We the People.